I keep thinking about surnames, even though I’ve written about them quite a few times now. I think I find them so interesting because in the past, when they were granted to people, there was a degree of conscious thought behind them, and they were quite literal and descriptive, compared to first names. Recently, I’ve been pondering the surnames Young and Oldman. Continue reading
I’d never heard of Barbara L’Italien, an American politician with the Democratic party, before today. She was accidentally invited onto a Fox “News” programme instead of a Democratic supporter of ICE, the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. With L’Italien being a staunch critic of ICE, the interview didn’t exactly go as the hosts had planned: Continue reading
I was listening to my newest musical purchase, Pink Floyd’s Animals, today (I’m hip to the music of 1977). Continue reading
It’s funny. I’ve thought a lot about what words mean, particularly names. Even more particularly, names which are clearly interesting or unusual. And I’ve thought a lot about William Shakespeare. But I’ve never thought about his surname before.
What do these four women have in common?
Why, the fact that they all have the same name of course!
OK, they don’t really, but it’s not entirely inaccurate to say so. Why not? Read on…
Black, White, Grey, Green, Brown, Gold/Golden. Niall, I hear you ask, why have you capitalised all those colours!? Surely you’re not going to tell us that there’s some obscure English rule that says that you have to use capital letters with colours, and we’ve all been doing it wrong all this time? God I’d love to, but no, those words are capitalised because, yes, they’re colours, but in this case I’m using them as surnames.
I’ve written before about surnames, and what they mean. Most of them have fairly mundane origins, describing people’s jobs or their birthplaces. This is because in the grand scheme of things, surnames are fairly new. Many of the earliest English surnames were attached to people to differentiate them from other people in the village with the same first name (e.g. that’s John Miller the miller, not John Taylor the tailor). If you think about a lot of common English surnames, it’s probably not too hard to imagine where they came from. But why is it that colours are so common as surnames?
What’s your name?
Not a particularly difficult question, generally speaking. In English, when we say name, we usually mean a person’s given, or first, name. Things can be a little more confusing when you have to switch to dealing with French though. I’m currently living in Belgium, and routinely get momentarily confused by forms which ask first for nom, and then prénom. My instinct is to write my first name in the space for nom, until I remember that in French, nom means surname, and prénom means first name. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 